No lurching here, please

Posted by Mad Mitch on UTC 2016-11-01 09:17.

Lurches everywhere

After recent wins by the party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in a
number of state elections in Germany we read dramatic pieces about a
'lurch to the right'. Similar headlines are generated by election
results throughout Europe: France (2012), Norway (2013), Sweden (2014),
Denmark (2015), Switzerland (2015). Sometimes the 'lurch' is to the
right, sometimes to the left.

Whatever. Nothing ever really changes. The
alphabet soup of proportional voting systems absorbs lurches, that is in
its nature. There has to be a huge – immense – lurch before before anything really changes.
For example, after the fragility of the Weimar Republic, the post-war German electoral system was
designed never to allow any major political change at all to take place – you can have as many lurches as you like, but that pyramid will rest unmoved on its ample bottom.

Switzerland supplied us with a good example of a 'lurch to the right' in
the National Parliamentary elections a year ago, which raised hopes or
fears for the future in accordance with your politics. What has happened?
Nothing. There has been no perceptible change in national politics at all.

A few days ago an opinion piece appeared in the traditionally liberal
(≈centre-right) Swiss newspaper, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which sighed in despair at the lack of change in the past year:

It would be nice to see the liberal forces in Parliament opposing the
mainstream more strongly and developing liberal ideas, even when, at the
moment, there is no majority to implement them. Sooner or later, a
centre-right Parliament, which up to now has distinguished itself by its
love of spending and its statism, will lose its credibility.

But that is what proportionally represented, coalition-based parliaments
always do: they coalesce around the fly-paper in the middle of the room. The fiery,
hotheaded newcomers integrate into the existing collegial ranks and the
esprit de corps so feared by Thomas Jefferson soon kicks in. After only a
year you look from pig to man and man to pig and there really is no
perceptible difference.

UKIP: No to the EU, yes to European-style government

We read that UKIP, along with all the other minority parties in Britain,
wants to drink the European poison of proportional representation. At the
last General Election in the UK four million votes gained the party one seat
out of 650. Four million wasted votes, they tell us. But if it had
brought them, say, 30 seats under a proportional system, what difference
would it have made apart from employing 30 Kippers? None.

We could just
pretend that the four million votes had been somehow not wasted, when,
in fact, they clearly would have been: those four million votes would still have achieved
nothing. Thirty Kippers would be kept busy in their constituencies sorting out
their constituents' grumbles with the welfare state, acting, in effect, as lackeys in
the service of the administrative machine they so detest.
With proportional representation in the United Kingdom, UKIP and all the other minority parties will just become
employers of Members of Parliament. Nothing will change.

It is also questionable whether UKIP would still get four million votes under a PR system
when so many other small parties would have become viable competitors.
UKIP might end up with ten members sharing the benches with a couple of
Monster Raving Loonies and an assortment of fundamentalist
knuckle-draggers.

What have all those years of UKIP members sitting in
the European Parliament changed? Nothing.
Remember the 'lurch to UKIP' in the EU Parliament elections in 2014? What happened? Nothing.

Leviathan

In developed countries the extension of the modern state into all aspects
of its citizens' lives means that there is really nothing fundamental
left to be changed. The extended state is run by political and
administrative functionaries – it has to be, because it has extended
beyond politics. All the great spending departments are simply administrative swamps. The only way to change things and make politics
meaningful again is to reduce the reach of the state dramatically.

The state has also extended beyond its own boundaries.
A highlight of Brexit so far has been the gradual realisation of how broad and how deep the
interlinking of modern states has become: the functionaries of the world rule, OK? What is this sovereignty thing, anyway?
Such a massive lurch, in the current political system of consensus and self-interest,
is never going to happen. The 'Great Repeal Act' is really just the 'Great Perpetuation Act'.
Nothing at all will change.

Political roulette

Unless, of course, you are foolish enough to hold a referendum. The political class in that
referendum paradise, Switzerland, is currently desperately trying to
cope with the political fall out of a number of referendum decisions
they cannot bring themselves to implement. How can functionaries work with a
direct democracy that can overnight, seemingly on a whim, take a hammer
to all their beautiful administrative constructs? Just as the UK
government is still struggling with the outcome of the Brexit
referendum, having learned the dangers of this referendum gambit the
hard way. They won't do that again.